The Application Of Lexical Chunks To English Teaching At Junior Middle School

It is well known that vocabulary is a very important component of a language and plays a critical role in language learning and teaching. Recently, lexical approach has drawn more and more linguists' attention and received great interest as an alternative to grammar-based approaches.Michael Lewis once said, "Language consists of grammarticalised lexis, not lexicalised grammar" (Michael Lewis, 1993: 89). He also insisted that chunks are the focus of languages teaching and languages use as well, for they help accelerate the speed of language processing, facilitate the L2 acquisition and develop learners' language output. The lexical approach concentrates on developing learners' proficiency with lexis, or words and word combinations. It is based on the idea that an important part of language acquisition is the ability to comprehend and produce lexical phrases as unanalyzed wholes, or "chunks", and that these chunks become the raw data by which learners perceive patterns of language traditionally thought as grammar.Based on the theory of prefabricated chunks, this paper aims to attest the efficiency of lexical chunks in junior high school English teaching. The thesis starts with the literature review to examine and summarize the main findings of the studies in this field, on which the research hypothesis is established and the teaching experiment is designed.The experiment was conducted in two classes. The subjects in both classes were considered of the same language proficiency according to the statistical analysis of the pretest. One of the classes was appointed as the experimental group, where the lexical approach was employed, and the other as the control group, where traditional teaching was in use. The experiment lasted about one semester, from November 2006 to April 2007. Data analysis shows that the lexical approach does improve learners' ability of English learning.